Founded in January 2000 by Panasonic, SanDisk and Toshiba, the SD Association is a group dedicated to establishing SD standards and facilitating their adoption and development.
At its outset the Association represented just 14 member companies and has grown into a global alliance comprised of around 1,000 member companies. By developing and adopting SD standards, members enjoy better compatibility of member cards between devices, greatly enhancing consumer enjoyment and convenience.

SD Standards Make Product Design Easier

The SD host controller specification manages both SD memory card standards and SDIO card standards. This simplifies host system and driver designs by using a standardized implementation that reduces product development time. It defines a standard register set to control SD memory card and SDIO card standards.

The specification also provides a sophisticated direct memory access function to achieve high-performance data transfers between SD standard host systems and memory cards. Largely because of hardware control, SD transfers data without having to rely on the CPU specifications.

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